Applying Lateral Wisdom to Personal, Organizational, and Church Learning

May 2012

May 31, 2012

In a meeting the other day, my team and I were brainstorming about how to ship or transfer the Saddleback Church DNA to the 12 new Saddlebacks we are launching around the globe.

We had toyed with the idea of "Church in a Box", but we realized that everything we are using will eventually have to be digital.

I said, "If it's digital then it will eventually be accessed from the cloud. It's not church in a box, it's church in the cloud." Church in the cloud. That is the global church future.

International telecom companies have a goal, to connect the entire world with Internet access.

Storage and hardware is also becoming cheaper and more available.

Most churches want all their content digital. Once it is digital it can be easily broken into smaller and smaller bits, or assembled into huge files of digital bytes.

A ubiquitous Internet will provide the power grid or the pipeline from which all this digital content can flow.

And because the Internet is social…all of the digital content from churches can be shared. No. It will be shared.

Because open source platforms and the philosophy of openness is becoming more expected by people and the organizations (churches too) that people work and interact with.

The cloud means we spend more time creating quality content and less time about where to store it or ship it. It goes on the cloud.

And once on the cloud the social sharing nature of users combined with openness of platform will spread the content far and wide. And one thing we know already, the better the content, the wider the distribution.

The potential for global distribution via social sharing is always one click away in an Internet connected world.

Church is going to the cloud because technology enables it and people demand it.